A Time for Burning: Refusal as a Pathway to Freedom, Healing, and Transformation

• In Event: Refusal, Radical Imaginations, and World Remaking Curriculum

Abstract

As educators, what is our responsibility to the over 500-years of curricula undergirded by racist, classist, sexist, and ableist ideologies, the violences levied against Black children? The purpose of this conceptual paper is to highlight educators' collective role and responsibility in educating Black children in the face of antiblackness and to also provide a “loving critique forward” when envisioning Black education’s futurity. How educational researchers and practitioners imagine and reimagine classroom spaces for and with our Black students is imperative to counter the pervasiveness of antiblackness in K-12 schooling and beyond. Through the concept of refusal as burning educators can accept educational responsibility when they refuse to participate in white-dominant discourses that are predicated against Black children.

Authors

• Amir Asim Gilmore, Washington State University - Pullman

• Kiersten Guetlein, Washington State University - Pullman

• Brandon T Cockburn, Washington State University - Pullman